Life Under Siege
The New York Times
Editorial
April 10, 2002
By ALLEGRA PACHECO
BETHLEHEM, West Bank -
Last Thursday night Jihad
Abu Ajour, a young woman living
down the road from me, gave
birth to her first child in her
home in Dheisheh refugee camp
in Bethlehem. The Israeli Army
was refusing to allow ambulances
to approach the camp. Ms. Abu
Ajour's baby was not breathing properly. Hours later an
ambulance finally came to take the baby to the hospital,
where he died soon after. Later, under the night curfew
and the threat of snipers, the two grandfathers and the
father sneaked out of the camp to the nearby cemetery to
bury the baby.
In its quest to stop suicide bombings in Israel, the Israeli
Army invaded Bethlehem last week and has placed the
entire civilian population under siege. The people here are
running short of water, food and milk for the young.
Those lucky enough to have stored food before the
invasion now sit in crowded rooms far away from windows
exposed to gunfire. Those without food wait in desperation
for the Red Cross to reach them with supplies. Armored
personnel carriers and soldiers patrol the streets, and
shots are fired in all directions. A safe corner in the house
today can be a deathbed tomorrow.
On Monday, the Israeli Army lifted the curfew for a few
hours, but that didn't help much. The main market and
neighborhood stores were almost empty. Because the city
has been totally sealed off, no new food has replenished
the market shelves. Still, it was good to go outside briefly,
after nearly a week when no one dared to step outside for
fear of being shot by an Israeli sniper. The sick, though,
stay sick in their homes.
The sound of gun and tank fire still echoes around the
hills while Israeli soldiers move from neighborhood to
neighborhood entering homes, detaining the men and
leaving the women, elderly and children abandoned.
Hundreds of male residents of Bethlehem have been
taken away in the last few days. They, along with more
than 1,000 other Palestinian men, are being held in
detention in an Israeli Army base outside Ramallah. Last
week, B'Tselem and other Israeli human rights
organizations appealed to Israel's Supreme Court to
cancel the military order prohibiting lawyers from visiting
the detainees for 18 days after the arrests. On Sunday the
court rejected the petition and upheld the
incommunicado detention.
The laws of war, as codified in the Fourth Geneva
Convention, severely restrict armies from involving civilian
populations in military actions. The dignity of each and
every person much be respected at all times; the wounded
and sick must be cared for. Yet each additional day of this
invasion increases the attack on the civilian population.
As an Israeli human rights lawyer representing
Palestinians in the West Bank, I am witnessing another
stage of the human rights violations that the Israeli
occupation has caused.
Though selectively applied by many countries, and
disregarded by others, human rights are still recognized
universally as the common standard and fundamental
ingredient for peace and stability in the world. The
ideology of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
adopted after World War II, rests on the principle that
every individual has a claim to autonomy, dignity and
justice. The situation in the occupied territories today
defies the meaning of that declaration. When the Israeli
Army raided Dheisheh and other impoverished refugee
camps last month, it killed and wounded civilians,
destroyed buildings and homes and cut off water supply
for thousands. The army rounded up hundreds of male
residents, though many of the men were eventually
released because there was no evidence they were
involved in terrorism.
Yet within days, Palestinian suicide bombers, including
an 18-year-old woman from the Dheisheh camp, killed
dozens of Israeli civilians in attacks. When he was elected,
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised peace and security
within 100 days. Now, 400 days later, Mr. Sharon has
declared that Israel is at war. He has assured the Israeli
people, frightened to walk on their own streets, that the
way to stop suicide bombers is to invade Palestinian
territory and imprison hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians in their homes. But the number of attacks in
the last month shows a military response does not always
stop the desperate.
In every peace agreement negotiated during the Oslo
process, human rights were inserted as an afterthought, a
politely worded aspiration with no teeth and no
enforcement. The 1995 interim Oslo agreement devoted
64 pages to security and only a few lines to human rights
and the rule of law. In fact, the Palestinian police forces,
created by the Oslo agreement, have committed their own
human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. Had
human rights been the centerpiece of the peace accord
and the construction of Palestine, the situation might be
vastly different today.
Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the drafters of the human rights
declaration, said that human rights begin in the world of
the individual person - his or her neighborhood, home,
school, factory or farm or the office where he or she works.
"Such are the places where every man, woman, and child
seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity
without discrimination," she wrote. "Unless these rights
have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere."
Without a genuine embrace of human rights in the
occupied territories, there is no reason to hope for a stable
peace.
Allegra Pacheco is an Israeli lawyer who represents
Palestinians in the West Bank.
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